Why is the Atlantic slowly filling with crude petroleum, threatening a
millions-of-years-old ecological balance? Why did traders at prominent
banks take high-risk gambles with the money entrusted to them by
hundreds of thousands of clients around the world, expanding and
leveraging their investments to the point that failure led to a global
financial crisis that left millions of people jobless and hundreds of
cities economically devastated? Why would the world's most powerful
military spend ten years fighting an enemy that presents no direct
threat to secure resources for corporations?
The culprit in all cases is neoliberal ideology--the belief in the
supremacy of "free" markets to drive and govern human affairs. And in
the years since the initial publication of Noam Chomsky's Profit Over
People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, the bitter vines of
neoliberalism have only twisted themselves further into the world
economy, obliterating the public's voice in public affairs and
substituting the bottom line in place of people's basic obligation to
care for one another as ends in themselves. In Profit Over People,
Chomsky reveals the roots of the present crisis, tracing the history of
neoliberalism through an incisive analysis of free trade agreements of
the 1990s, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary
Fund--and describes the movements of resistance to the increasing
interference by the private sector in global affairs.
In the years since the initial publication of Profit Over People, the
stakes have only risen. Now more than ever, Profit Over People is one
of the key texts explaining how the crisis facing us operates--and how,
through Chomsky's analysis of resistance, we may find an escape from the
closing net.
